Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Crucified Smurfs

It's hard to avoid Fernando Botero's paintings down here in South Florida. The Colombian artist's pudgy figures are enormously popular – every poster shop has reproductions, and most galleries either have real Boteros or second-rate imitations. For my part, I've never been able to tell the difference between an imitation Botero and the real thing, just as I find little to separate Stephen King parodies from echt Stephen King – I've always found Botero's puffy figures, rendered in a kind of (faux?) naive realism, the height of contemporary kitsch: not merely the sort of art that people who don't like art like – Norman Rockwell, whatever you might say about the implicit politics of his images, was an incredible draughtsman, as was Grant Wood – but the sort of art that people who don't really like art but think they like art, or want you to think they like art, like.

This isn't a kind of apotropaic response on my part to figurative art in general - I'm a great fan of Wood, of RB Kitaj, Eva Hesse, and Balthus. Perhaps it's just that Botero's figures, vast, puffy, cherubic, and even when butt-naked absolutely sexless, seem to have been sieved of all human interest, leaving nothing but a kind of piggish contentment. These aren't George Grosz's fatties, who seem to be the human equivalents of rather savage wild boars, but a endless stream of humanized gelded cats.

So I was rather surprised when a family member alerted me that her old philosophy prof Arthur Danto was reviewing Botero in a recent issue of The Nation – and that the works he was reviewing were a series of paintings about the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib – frankly the last thing I would imagine Botero painting. It's like imagining Thomas Kinkade painting Guernica, or Norman Rockwell illustrating the Bataan Death March.

But it's true: Botero has done a very long series of canvases & drawings based on the reports of prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib, tho not based, he insists, on the widely circulated photographs of that abuse. Danto makes a nice point about that distinction:
We knew that Abu Ghraib's prisoners were suffering, but we did not feel that suffering as ours. When the photographs were released, the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment. But the photographs did not bring us closer to the agonies of the victims.
In contrast – according to Danto – Botero's paintings
are masterpieces of what I have called disturbatory art--art whose point and purpose is to make vivid and objective our most frightening subjective thoughts.... Botero's images, by contrast, establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own. As Botero once remarked: "A painter can do things a photographer can't do, because a painter can make the invisible visible." What is invisible is the felt anguish of humiliation, and of pain. Photographs can only show what is visible; what Susan Sontag memorably called the "pain of others" lies outside their reach. But it can be conveyed in painting, as Botero's Abu Ghraib series reminds us, for the limits of photography are not the limits of art. The mystery of painting, almost forgotten since the Counter-Reformation, lies in its power to generate a kind of illusion that has less to do with pictorial perception than it does with feeling.
Leaving aside for a moment whether or not Botero's paintings "establish a visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to internalize and make vicariously our own," I am appalled by Danto's initial assumption that when the Abu Ghraib photos were first disseminated "the moral indignation of the West was focused on the grinning soldiers, for whom this appalling spectacle was a form of entertainment" to the exclusion of any sympathy with "the agonies of the victims." What West does he refer to? Donald Rumsfeld's? Time magazine's?

My own outraged reaction to the photographs stemmed from a combination of disgust at the touristic, sadistic poses & expressions of the American soldiers posing for the photographs and precisely an immediate sympathy for the men being abused – a sympathy that I can't imagine any viewer outside of the present American administration wouldn't feel: yes, Professor Danto, we shrank from that snarling dog, we felt the degradation of being piled into a naked pyramid, of being forced to grovel at the end of a leash.

It's the very verisimilitude of the photographs, in my own experience, that elicited immediate sympathy, the fact that the naked and degraded men in them had individual bodies and faces – they looked like my friends, my students, the guys I used to see in the communal showers in my dorm. And that's why the Botero paintings, while they have a certain weird postmodern fascination, ultimately fail to move me. It's strange indeed, and somewhat disturbing, to see Botero-figures put through Abu Ghraib tortures – but it's a weirdness that's akin to seeing Smurfs crucified, or seeing Mickey Mouse shooting up & having sex. These are not human beings being tortured: they're Boteros being put thru unfamiliar paces. Botero's very success at making his friendly chubbies into a world-recognized brand-emblem, it would seem, has deprived him of the ability to do anything more than continue to sell the brand.

Perhaps it's the very middle-brow allure of the standard Botero that makes these horror-Boteros so strangely unmoving to me. In contrast, I find the iPod/iRaq graphic – which was surreptitiously inserted into a number of Apple street advertisements in New York two years ago – to be far more emotionally compelling, & to pack a far more intellectually incisive punch.

32 comments:

Moby Dick said...

Weird art, no doubt it will end up in the Miami offices of many latin lawyers and business people.

Anonymous said...

"The works are not for sale because it would not be proper to profit from such events. It is immoral to try to make money out of the suffering of people.

"I had no commercial intention in painting these works. I produced them purely to say something about the horror. And since all art is communication, it's more important that they are seen in museums and big public exhibitions than that they are hidden away in the house of a private collector.

"Eventually they’ll be given to some institution."

Anonymous said...

Obviously a person that wrote this article has a little or no appropriation for paintings. I suggest sticking to a rock music concerts.

So Cal Peeper said...

at least they look well fed...

Anonymous said...

Well, I actually go to American Univeristy where the show is currently hung and I have to agree with the author of this article. I find the show to be more mind numbing than anything else. It doesn't do a very ggod job of conveying the pain and suffering of the event.

Anonymous said...

Little or no appreciation for paintings? I think the author does have a good appreciation for paintings, and has correctly identified these paintings as kitsch. The only reason that I can see for the acceptance of these paintings amongst the art establishment as "high art" or some such is due to the cachet of the painter's biographic details. That is to say, that he is charmingly third world. His paintings however, are excruciatingly boring and repetitive. Were he from Kansas, he would be ignored.

Anonymous said...

our scorn for Botero is this righteous scorn of the drone and commentator, one who apparently has enough time on his hands to imagine smurfs being crucified. It seems to be enough for Botero's work to be freely available in reproduction to condemn him. Perhaps we should apply the same criteria to Warhol or Leonardo. O no! he's popular! he must be bad! And who were these naked and degraded men Mr Scroggins used to see in the in the communal shower in his dorm? Where did he go to college - Guantanamo? Don't give up the day job Mr Scroggins & perhaps get a bit of criticism under your belt before you take on Arthur Danto.

carlo said...

I think no one can avoid Botero's paintings because I've followed his career for years, for me his the best painter in the world, and I'm proud he's from Colombia.

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Tim Weston said...

I think this review is slightly supercilious. Perhaps Botero is closest to the Latin Amarican Magic realist writers. In this sense, his imagery is a couple of removes from reportage or the schlok horror of ,say, Francis Bacon. i think the current art scene is often very contradictory in wanting to distance itself from the popular while at the same time courting it. I also think the writer should not condemn people he does not know and deduce their motives based upon his own untested hunch. How does he know that people who like Botero's work do not really like art? How do we know that he really likes art and not simply its cliquish trappings?

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